My take is that it would be a more prohibitive query (for the server) to generate the information. Jon is a master of modular programming and web page design, so adding the visual aspect of the new stat would be child's play. That has never been the issue, to my knowledge.

The issue is with accessing relational data. Let's look at an easy stat like HP:

SELECT hp FROM minion ORDER BY hp

Doesn't get much simpler than that. I have no idea what Jon's table and column names are, etc., but you get the idea.

AC is not an attribute of the minion (at least I assume it isn't at the moment). Total AC is the sum of all equipment the minion is wearing. That means a query would have to walk the minion table, the association table linking minions to equipment, and the equipment table (which is probably rather large). Then, sum up the base armor and plus on the armor, and there you have a total by minion. This _might_ be possible in a single query, but it would be a large one. Worst case scenario is that a stored procedure would have to be written to iterate through each minion's equipment, and in that case we are talking orders of magnitude on the performance hit.

The alternative would be to store the total AC on each minion, and then be sure to update it in all places where equipment can change and therefore change the number. There is one word for this in the database world: denormalization. There is another word for this in the database world: icky.

But you are saying, "It can't be that hard, it shows on the Inspect page!" That is the difference between on-demand data on a case-by-case basis and batch queries encompassing the entire system. It is easy to do what I mention above on a character by character basis. It's the doing it for everyone every time stats are calculated that is hard on the server.

Who knows, maybe it wouldn't be that hard on the server (and Jon has added functionality before as technology increases to try to keep pace with his genius *smile*). But Jon knows his hardware, he wrote the software, and he knows what he is doing.